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Comment by valuearb | Hacker News Reader

His actual statement was that human rights are more important than property rights, yet property rights are a human right.

So it’s a nonsensical straw horse that actually just helps establish that the terms “right” and “left” are meaningless and only meant to divide and demonize people.

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From the article: Steven Brust: "Ask what's more important, human rights, or property rights. If they say property rights are a human right, they're on the right."

Believing you should have the right to own possessions, a home or a business doesn’t put you on the right, it places you firmly in the vast center.

It is all relative to you I guess, for a true idealogical communist any individual property right is as right as it gets, while people who generally are from western style capitalist economies, individual property right is probably centre or maybe even centre left and similar rights to corporate entities may be considered centre right .

He's not arguing whether or not we should have property rights. The question is which is more important, property rights or human rights. There are times when these rights clash and we as a society have to pick one or the other.

For example, if a huge natural disaster (like hurricane Katrina) wipes out the livelihood of millions of people and the government hasn't provided aid yet. Should a person who is hungry and lost everything be able to go inside a store and take food? He has a human right to live but that store also has property rights over their products. Some (not all) conservatives would argue that the hungry person should be prosecuted for stealing, while most people on the left would argue the opposite.

He is arguing over whether we should have property rights because he apparently doesn’t believe it.

And your convoluted and unlikely analogy fails because you can’t describe why this person should be allowed to steal food others are willing to pay for. Paying for food allows the store to stock more food to feed far more people, stealing the food forces the store to stop selling food.

Why isn’t the government buying food to distribute to people in need without destroying private businesses?

If I believe in property rights and using government to distribute food to the needy, am I a lefty or a righty? Or is there some other label to demonize me with because I don’t believe all of the exact same things as you and the author?

It is not a question of whether or not you should be able to own a home. It's a question of whether or not a large store of food should be guarded behind a barb wire fence while people outside starve. I think we can run a functioning economy without denying people the right to life.

> property rights are a human right

I broadly agree with that statement, but it demands a definition of terms. Which property rights are human rights? Certainly, the right to a limited liability corporate form is not a human right.

I think you might be interested in William Blackstone's "Commentaries on the Laws of England" [1]. The US inherited all its property laws from British common law.

It's a tough read, but it is fascinating. Makes you ask questions like "what is property?" What makes something yours? Another interesting read is Johnson v. M'Intosh [2], which is a bit easier and shorter.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commentaries_on_the_Laws_of_En...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnson_v._M%27Intosh

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